THE TATTOO MAGAZINE PRICK HAS POSTED A FEATURE ON JS. HERE’S A LITTLE OF WHAT THEY HAD TO SAY:
“Enter “Narsica: Our Lady of Ashes,” the tale of a man’s love and hate for a teenaged prostitute and drug addict who blows into his world like an unexpected ocean storm on an otherwise calm day of sailing. With his lust for the open road, robust adventures, and thrill for the untamed life, Shaw is the closest thing we have to Kerouac in this modern day and age.”
ALTHOUGH THE BOOK SOLD OUT ON AMAZON IN THE FIRST NINE MINUTES OF ITS RELEASE, IT IS STILL AVAILABLE ON HEARTWORM’S WEBSITE.
REMEMBER THERE ARE LIMITED COPIES, SO HURRY UP AND GET IT!!!!
ALSO, IF ANYONE KNOWS WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT OR HAS SEEN IT, PLEASE LET US KNOW!
WE WILL BE POSTING A LIST OF SELECTED BOOKSTORES WHERE IT CAN BE FOUND SOON.
So it’s been brought to my attention, for the umpteenth time, that I am a horrific editor. If Helen Keller were asked to edit Mirriam Webster’s… it would look something like the job I do on a daily basis. But that is not the point.
Here’s a little story, to keep you busy while I figure out my point.
Back when I was a skinny little junkie of eighteen, I found myself in Hollywood, California, puking up blood in a gutter on the corner of Sunset and Vermont.
Suddenly I was startled by the engine of a motorcycle. I lifted my head and wiped my mouth only to see the enigmatic and intimidating Jonathan Shaw, looking down at me with hearts in his eyes from a smoking two wheeled gypsy perch.
“Hey little girl, wanna go for a ride?” He asked me. (I’m pretty sure those were the exact words…) Then he handed me a tiny battered “bitch” helmet.
“Sure” I burped.
He took me to a little barbecue joint on Cahuenga Blvd where we sat for about two hours and he asked me what I was doing with my life.
“I’m an editor” I told him with stars in my dope-pinned eyes.
It was not a lie, it was just the only answer I could come up with in my brain which had at that point been poisoned and roasted and toasted and burned out several times over. Plus, I’d like to think the question was a completely unnecessary means of creating “friendly conversation”, due to the fact that I was clearly insane, I weighed about 35 pounds soaking wet, had jaundice, staph infections, crack sores and reeked of detoxification.
I was not doing anything with my life, besides destroying what was left of it.
“Well, good,” he said.
Then he handed me 300 dollars and a little manuscript called Scardust, which you will all be very familiar with in the not too far off future, if the world continues to exist for another few years, which it might not at this rate because I crashed my car. What time is it.
Anyway, he asked me to look this manuscript over for him and I said yes and then he asked me to move in with him in his lonely Hollywood penthouse to which I also said yes, since my boyfriend had locked me out of our apartment.
This 6 month period was split between Los Angeles, Rio De Janeiro, and New York City, trembling under Jonathan’s greasy black wing, during which time I flirted with the following possible career opportunities (in no particular order):
Painter, Tattoo Artist, Prostitute, Jet Setter, Egg Donor, Drug Counselor, Drug, Dealer, Drug Addict, DJ, Fashion Designer, Indentured Servant, Waitress, Phone Answerer, Suicide Girl, Chef, Insomniac, Mental Patient, Serial Killer, Serial Domestic Abuser, Poet, Psychologist, Philosopher…
Until one day… Finally… After much adue… Jonathan Shaw grew tired of my squirrelly behavior, put a notebook, a pen and a coconut in my hand, and left me sitting on a beach in Rio de Janeiro for ten hours.
The rest is history.
Here is the abridged version…
While Jonathan began his ongoing battle with a disease I like to call Narcisa, I returned to Los Angeles to “brainstorm” on the “future” of Jonathan’s massive memoir project, Scabvendor: - Confessions of a Tattoo Artist.
Soon enough, that veered off into Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes which Jonathan played around with for three months until Heartworm Press having heard of it through some putrid underground grapevine, came along, unsolicited, and took it off his bleeding hands…
I then started a website called Scabvendor.com, a place for Jonathan and I to share Narcisa and the rest of his wacked-out life and times with other sick fucks like you, a safe haven for us to ruminate on all the cunts that torment our charmed existence and so, so much more.
The unabridged version will be available on my Wikipedia, someday…
The point is… I’m not an editor.
Right now I am a sleepy blogger. Tomorrow… I’m not sure. It will probably involve fixing some more typos.
So it goes.
So, now the time has come… Jonathan has finally begun a whole new marathon rewrite of “Narcisa - Our Lady of Ashes“.
This time he’s working hand in hand with a seasoned book editor for a major literary agency - a real step up from a few weeks proof-reading the first edition’s funky first draft text with me, sitting in coffee houses and all-nite greasy-spoons around Silverlake, Echo Park and Hollyweird.
Our original editing system was always pretty haphazard and unconventional, to say the least….
But now…..
with daily blog posts, and this whole website shit up and running, and Jonathan long gone, back home in Brazil with his crazy crackhead, Narcisa, it’s all swiftly plummeted south to the next level of wierdness, coming together, a day at a time, mostly through tidbits and scraps of random emails, peppered with numbered headings, sometimes in strange heiroglyphic text but ALWAYS broken off in the middle by that familiar tagline.
“Sent Via Blackberry T-Mobile”.
That’s right kids, he now writes and edits all of his blog entries on a friggin’ blackberry.
BUT. WAIT.
The jig doesn’t stop there…
This is a 360 some odd page novel he’s re-working down there.
And, get this: Jonathan has proceeded to begin the whole fucking rewrite on his little pocket sized Crackberry too!!
RE-WRITE. AS IN, he’s re-writing… a book. On a Blackberry. I’m not joking. Or laughing. Well maybe a little.
Sitting on a motorcycle in the middle of the jungle, dodging automatic weapon fire up in some shanty town drug war favela, sitting on some rodent-infested rock by the beach or whatever whorehouse he’s sitting (or laying up) in right now…
Whatever the fuck he does that no one will ever really know…
Typing. On the Blackberry.
The following recent email exchange between us should give you some idea where my head’s been at today…
And as a pre-req, please envision the grimace on his Hollywood-bound assistant’s (that would be yours truly) pretty little face while I sit at my desk, running the whole official shit show from my office at the Crow’s nest overlooking the glittering lights of Babylon and the smog of the apocalypse.
I wrote this email to Jonathan a full FIVE times before sending it, searching for the right words to express my absolute outrage at his working methods…
At first it was a very angry email, I chastised him mercilessly for being an inconsiderate, unprincipaled caveman of an ignorant old Ludite prick with no decent sense of respect for modern communication systems or basic technology. But then I realized… how the fuck could anybody really get pissed off at such a spectacular display of savage insanity? Some might even call it genius…. I call it atavistic genius (something like a cross between Asberger’s and Bukowski logic).
- Alessandra
Here goes:
From: SAILOR
Subject: Blackberry endorsements and Lasek surgery
Date: June 13, 2008 4:14:52 PM PDT
To: JS
Captain-
Has that bitch got you smoking crack now? WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!! Shit’s cut off, nothing’s in the right order, I cant even believe you’re just merrily going about your business down there in the jungles of Hell, attempting a MAJOR rewrite on a 360 page book from your fucking Blackberry… as if that is something even remotely acceptable or normal.
Only you, you pirate-minded mentally insane psychopathic whore-fucking douchebag sniveling demented freak.
I have to wonder… How did I get so graced by the hand of such a technologically impaired innovator?
I fucking love you.
This will definitely go down in literary history…
Take the following, for example…
“So Jonathan, how did you become blind?”
” Well I was writing this novel on my blackberry and…”
From: JS
Subject: Re: Blackberry endorsements and Lasek surgery
Date: June 13, 2008 7:28:51 PM PDT
To: SAILOR
Little Sailor. You’re lucky I like you for being so hilariously… Retarded.
This aint exactly fuckin’ Starbucks here, darlin’!
I know you mean well, ya little suburban white trash SUV-driving, attorney-blowing hosebag amateur hooker… but it’s not like ya can just whip out the old laptop and start getting all artsy-fartsy here in the fucking vermin-infested crack ghettos of Rio, ya know…
I love you too. You are truly my other wacko muse, ya sniveling little cunt!!!
Btw, go ahead and put that ‘how’d you go blind?’ question into that big collective interview you’re supposedly preparing for me, whenever the time comes…
By the time you get it all together with all yer big shot Bel-air celebrity ass-sucking pals, maybe I’ll be deaf and dumb too.
And that could be a real fucking blessing, the way things are going loonie-toons around here lately, believe me!
Gotta go go go go goooo!!!
“Hasta la vitoria, siempre!”
Xx js
Sent Via Blackberry T-Mobile
WHAT A COMPLICIT BOND WE HAVE. Goodnight boys and girls.
It’s the third hundred-fucking-fifty degree day in a row here in Los Angeles and I’m completely deranged. I peel myself out of the chair in the office to lay paralyzed down by the pool, over and over like a fucking rat race while Griffith park is slowly burning down and my head is imploding because there’s no oxygen in the air anymore. Coughing cause I can’t catch my breath. It’s pathetic. Thank God I can laugh at myself.
Why is sitting around so exhausting?
I whimpered and limped in to the elevator like a squashed roach and crawled back up to the office to sit in my shitty chair and burn my ass three times already today. Now I’m having delirious jealous day dreams of Narcisa smoking crack in a cold dark cave… Oh to be Narcisa. Without the pipe. That’d be ideal.
I wonder what the fuck Jonathan and Narcisa are doing now. Does she know how lucky she is to be sitting on the back of that motorcycle cruising through Cabo Frio, or Penedo, or Resende or São Paulo, or wherever they may have ended up today on their roadtrip through the jungles of Hell. Atleast that Hell is moving and changing and green.. and alive. This Hell is stagnant. I’m grateful for my writing and editing to keep me busy and my general appreciation of awareness on days like this where I’d normally be shit-housed by 2pm and half-way on my way to being in a total blackout. That kind of shit happens in the summertime. It’s just what people like me do.
But it’s really not bad. I have fun all day doing what I’m doing. And the nights are sublime. They cool down and Candy I can just sit on the balcony of the Man Mansion in Laurel Canyon or at the Cat and the Fiddle and play lazy games of backgammon and collect our thoughts over coffee so I can prepare for the next sleepy haze. My Grandpa’s death has made the last few days a haze.
Yesterday I spent the day dragging myself around and wringing myself out like a wet towel, wiping the sweat off my Blackberry until it was so sweaty and dirty I could taste the salt coming off of it every time I answered it and the trackball got so slimy it just stopped working. Contacting so and so for a review… following up with others for some sign of life. Following up. Following up. There are no signs of life. I feel a great calm in this. I have some peace of mind for a moment. I wonder, does Narcisa have these moments?
It looks like everyone’s checked out this weekend. I don’t blame them.
So today I was sitting at Solar De Cahuenga on the corner of Cahuenga and Franklin, which is my usual haunt if anyone I owe money to ever wants to come find me, and after a particularly draining and bizarro phone call which I shouldn’t have answered but did anyway, the guy siting next to me made a comment about something I’d said on the phone- something about my hair. I looked at him for a second and then cracked a smile. We started talking about writing, books, I told him about Narcisa and all my other projects and he told me he runs a magazine. I said which one and he said “have you heard of FOUND?” to which I replied “umm yes, I am obsessed.”
FOUND is a compilation of love letters, grocery lists, photographs and other things that people find on the street. Send all your found shit to them and they will publish it.
some letters people found on FOUND
Now I’ve spent hours and hours of my lowly existence sitting on Howie Pyro’s couch laughing at this magazine and the sheer brilliance of the effect that looking into other people’s lives, even for just a glimpse, has on the human psyche. I don’t know if it’s therapeutic or just entertaining to live vicariously through other people for moments in time.
That is why I enjoy Jonathan’s work so much. I think I get off on it, being there but not being there. It’s like something I experienced last time I was in Brazil, riding through the favelas on the back of the motorcycle. At first I was scared shitless and did not want to go in to Rocinha, did not understand the De Facto government of the Drug Lords and why I had to take my helmet off when we passed the police barricade or why I had to show my face at all times and take off my glasses too. It was so foreign and I didn’t want to be there. So we left.
But as soon as we left, I wanted to go back in. I was curious, I wanted a taste. I wanted to live it, just a little. And then get out on command.
That is what FOUND magazine allows the reader to do.
That is what NARCISA allows the reader to do.
Fucking brilliant. Now I’m here, reading the issue of FOUND that Davy gave me before I left the coffee shop, between bouts of editing Narcisa and watching Forensic Files and smoking cigarette butts.
The whole conversation was inspiring though. It really put some fire under my ass to get this new project going with Jonathan, a book that will feature scanned journal entries that we’ve each saved over the years. It’s eerie how some of them mirror each other exactly. I am still kind of freaked out at how much our minds have melded.
I gotta go.
A
MY EASTER:Woke up to the smell of coffee on the stove and Joao Gilberto trickling through the small stereo this morning in the flat on Via Gioia. Had breakfast at the Panicerria in Brera, the downtown distritto dell’arte after not sleeping much Saturday night. Narcisa is FINALLY in the printers, thank God.
Been relating to Jonathan a lot these past few days as my father is also psychically, cosmically, umbillically connected to a young, vivacious, irrational, highly intelligent and half-demented Brazilian woman- dare I compare anyone to Narcisa, but there are a few vague similarities right there. I don’t really have anything bad to say about her, it’s more that I need to learn to practice tolerance toward people that don’t think the same way as me– which is most people. She is confused, I’ve been there. Compassion is the first step I guess.
As far as Narcisa goes. Any reaction is a good one I suppose.
I remember a few months ago I was reading a short story to a room full of people and one older woman starting crying and choking. Then she blurted out ” Just stop! Just shutup!” And she walked out of the room. As if she felt my pain vicariously through my words. Reliving her self induced trauma. Essentially she fell victim to what I look at as lessons. I paused a beat from reading, not sure what kind of reaction I was supposed to have… But I did all I could think to muster which was this big shit-eating grin. It was a good feeling to affect someone on that level.
So anyway, as I was off to Genova Nick was hopefully handing Narcisa off to Orlando Bloom, another pirate and friend of Jonathan, down in sunny Los Angeles.
My heart was in Milano, just for today. I feel at home there and will most likely end up living there for some period of time in the future.
Anyway. After eating poor Peter Cotton Tail for Easter dinner, I started getting antsy and decided I was sick off spaghetti and jumped on a plane real quick to London. So, here I am. Sitting at a friend of a friend’s flat in East London. It’s very cold here.
Now, if nobody minds, I am going to wax (fair warning).
For all of those who judge Jonathan or myself for what we are trying to do, it’s fine. Just know this:
People are in a constant process of growing all the time. I am not the same person as I was yesterday and in a sometimes very tangible way I can change as a person completely throughout the course of one day. And in that, I have lived many full and prosperous lifetimes in my short time on the earth.
You and I are always changing and moving, literally, the tiny particles that make up the matrix of our perceived reality bouncing around at higher speeds than the human eye can register. So, if for no other reason, THAT is why we’re here on this planet; to grow, to move, to change. To EVOLVE, essentially. We are living organisms. That’s just what we do.
Such is also true of any relationship. Its always shifting, changing, growing and evolving. The Course in Miracles states that Relationships are “assignments”.
It states that there’s no accidents or coincidences in who we become involved with whether on an intimate level, business level, friend level. A blowjob in the backseat of a car. Whatever. Its all the same. We are assigned to one another so that we may serve our highest purpose as an evolving creature- that we may learn from one another through interaction with the human species and thereby causing our brains to expand, which, by any definition of the word is “evolution”.
Marianne Williamson uses the example of a gemologist smoothing a gemstone to describe this process. In her own words, since she can explain it better:
“The raw amethyst rubs up against another raw amethyst and that’s how they are smoothed out. And so it is with you and me, our rough edges rub up against the rough edges of other people. And that’s how we smooth out our rough edges. If we never rub up against any others how then would the edges get smoothed out?”
Good question. They wouldn’t. We’d forever be stuck in the lowest stage of evolution. And rubbing our rough edges against others in an attempt to manifest our Creator is not always easy. Some edges are rougher, sharper, stronger than others. But, our only purpose is to GROW. There is no promise of happy ever after, or nirvana, although that usually comes with the territory over time. Lots and lots of rubbing. Basically, its a very simple formula. A+B is C.
All of the prior being said, it only makes sense that our greatest learning experiences come from relationships that can typically be described as nightmarish trainwrecks, tragic disasters.
Jonathan, like I strive to be, is a true guerreiro, and although he may stray far from the confines of conventional thinking, he has given himself whole-heartedly to the sole purpose of life, to grow. Eventually his amethyst, emerald, and onyx will smooth out, as they have already begun to do. So will Narcisa’s.
And as I was told by my dear friend Louisah once, “NO PRESSURE, NO DIAMOND!!!!!!!!” (and that’s exactly how she said it)I wish you all the same abundance and happiness that I feel on this sub-zero London night. I’m gonna watch Jamie roll on ecstasy now.
xx
So it’s 3:30 in the morning but I’m still up wondering why I can never sleep like a normal functioning human being in this city where everyone has 8 am wake up calls including myself. Why I feel lonely and isolated today, the way Narcisa must feel sometimes when she’s all alone up there in the favela. I worked all day at the coffee shop on Cahuenga and Franklin writing and emailing and sitting with Amy, Jonathan’s ex who is adorably pregnant and married to Noah Levine. Then I sent some more emails trying to set up a meeting in Berlin for a European book tour, went to see a guy about a thing, ate a hamburger really quickly and ran off into the night to seek some validation. Went to 86, the best decorated new bar in Hollywood, then stood outside of Vine Bar for a minute and felt empty so I wound (as usual) with Nicky at the Cafe 101 and drank some tea. When I got home I emailed Jonathan and told him to call me, but he didn’t.
I’m assuming right now he has a pillow over his face and is sleeping away under Brazilian summer sun. I missed him tonight. Tonight was painstakingly lonely. And then I realized, we’re all battling the same loneliness. It’s not about validation from other people. It’s about validation from yourself. Someone asked me what I wanted today and my answer was “oblivion”. And as true as it rang in that particular moment standing in front of the bar, it’s not true. Feelings are important. They are the only real thing in life. Everything else is an illusion- matter, time, space… it all comes from a feeling. Why would I not want that? I wish someone would explain that to Narcisa.
NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa vivo ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.
As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.
